:: Synapsis ::

"When you begin to write, you're in love with the language, with the act of creation, with yourself partly; but as you go on, the writing -- if you follow it -- will take you places you never intended to go and show you things you would never otherwise have seen. I began as a profoundly apolitical writer, but then I began to do what all novelists and some poets do: I began to describe the world around me." -Margaret Atwood

[Feb. 22]

:: Sunday, April 11, 2004 ::

www.thoughtbomb.net/guile/

Why am I leaving Synapsis behind? Its been a long time in coming. This me, this me isn't me anymore...and a lot of the parts of the me that you see here irritate me now, and the writing seems trite and out of touch. Much of it, at least. So now, you know where to find the me of the moment.

R.I.P. Synapsis
:: m 5:39 PM [+] ::
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I'm in Boston, now, and extremely busy. Life is...uncertain, but potential lies in the predicament of knowing that the vista is, for the most part, open. I have more to post later - a lot more - but will likely be adding them to a different blogger site (guile rather than synapsis) - not that anyone checks anymore, but in the event that you're looking for me, that's where you'll find me.

:: m 3:47 AM [+] ::
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It was what she didn't know about him that she thought she could fall in love with. The moments of uncertainty that occurred when she discovered something new, the way one stumbles over a twenty in the pocket of a just-washed pair of jeans. As men go, he was a deep pocket and the bills that kept mysteriously turning up were anything but chump change. Even so, it's hard to wear a garment that's across state lines, and prior experience told her that making the attempt would just find her suddenly realizing down the road that her ass has been all along.
The truth was that she could use a pair of pants like that one. She's gone through all the rest of them, and they just don't fit the way that they used to - she's in better shape now than she used to be, and even the ones that seem to be her size have holes and have come apart at the seams. Funny metaphor, but the truth is a funny thing. The reality of truth is a little bit less humorous. Sometimes he said things that made her wonder how well she really knew him; beautiful things that forced her to stop and be appreciative - a sentiment she had not really realized anyone else could cause without prior consideration on her part, and was uneasy about. Against the backdrop of what she knew, those beautiful things were a mire of either question or injustice: there was a dark night in their past when, humid and quietly breathing close together in a small room after the storm, he told her she would never get to heaven.
It wasn't as though he said it with ill intent or out of cruelty. The tone lacked the arrogance she associated with countless other sermons. The most she could chalk it up to was ignorance, but therein lies the crux of her silent struggle. Understanding remained elusive even so: how could someone capable of creating something so beautiful believe in a creation so ugly? How was she to feel, this condemned girl for whom judgement day came unexpectedly in the arms of that strange, compelling soul?
Questions or injustice and bullshit, she thinks, and she thinks also that she worries that he may be right - but the reasons aren't the same. Not even a little the same
:: m 3:44 AM [+] ::
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Have disabled archives for the time being. Am reconsidering what to do with this waste of cyberspace.
:: m 12:35 AM [+] ::
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somethingawful: Hentai Game Reviews!

Funny. Click. Enjoy.
:: m 4:29 PM [+] ::
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I just spent the last three days, as I said before, at the Bondurant school for High Performance Driving. I don't know how to explain quite how amazing an experience it was; although it was only for the span of those three days, I learned so much and did so much that trying to fit it all in here would be like trying to write a thorough 'What I did this summer' papers your teachers always assigned you on the first day of class in elementary school. At the moment, I'm on a plane flying back to Durango, and already the ground has gone from a parched and warm desert yellow to a faded gray dusting of snow beneath us...back to the frigid cold I go.
The car I was assigned to, which I'm pictured standing next to (and which, with any luck, should be displayed to the left of this entry by the time I make the posting) is a Mustang GT, but hardly any of the parts inside of the thing are stock, though I believe the actual engine block is the same. It's approximately 400 horsepower, with replaced shocks, springs, Baer Claw brakes, Bolsa exhaust, additional swaybars and other similar performance upgrades, lightweight racing alloy wheels, an extremely durable full-interior rollcage, window nets, and racing bucket seats with four-point Simpson harnesses to keep you from eating the steering wheel. And those are just the upgrades I -know- of. It hurts my brain to think how much money the school has spent on vehicles, since I would guess that they own well over a hundred and fifty Mustangs mechanically identical to that one. In addition, they have about fifty Formula 1 Fords, perhaps thirty top-end brand new Corvettes, and I would guess fifty of those new Cadillac sedans with the angular and flattish front and back ends, though I'll be damned if I remember what they're called. On the other side of the school, they have ShifterKarts - which look like extremely fancy go-karts, but are used widely by F1 and Indy car drivers in order to keep in shape during the off season, as they're extremely physically demanding to drive - they can go from zero to a hundred and back down to zero again in less than ten seconds.
The class I was taking was their three day High Performance Driving class, and most of the other people in it were taking the two-day version, which meant that on the third day my brother (who was taking the class along with me) and I had the asphalt entirely to ourselves. The rest of the people attending were in the 4 day Grand Prix class, and were using the track when we used the pad, the pad when we used the track.
We arrived on the first day and signed in. There was some difficulty with Cameron's signing in; because he's under the age of 18, some of his release slips ('I, the undersigned, will not hold Bondurant responsible if I crash into a wall going 100 miles per hour and am squished like an overripe turnip...') had to be notorized, but once it was taken care of, we were shuffled along with the 2 and 4 day students out on a brief tour of the facilities. They have the cleanest shop area I've ever seen in my life, where we met the resident grounds cat, Speedbump, and got to poke around briefly under the hood of a ridiculously upgraded Mustang Cobra. After a brief look at the F1 cars and the 'museum' (a room containing some of Bondurant's personal vehicles, pictures of his racing career, and information on his history in the world of racing), we were nudged back out onto the tarmac and piled into two one-ton white vans of the sort you expect to ride in whenever you take a shuttle from the airport. Thirteen of us to a van - fourteen if you count the front seat - and as we're sitting down, the driver tells us, "Now, everybody make sure they've got a seatbelt, and if you're queasy, you might not wanna stay on for the ride."
He took us out onto the track, and we hauled ass at 65 miles per hour in this van ("Completely stock," the driver tells us afterward) around the turns in what felt like a Disney World ride, save that it was considerably more dangerous. All of the instructors at Bondurant appear to be men in their late twenties and early thirties, and all of them apparently have at least two National championships in a vehicle event under their belts; some of them have World championships to top them off. This isn't a prerequisite, I'm told, but there's no doubt about it...these guys are incredible drivers.
Following the van ride, we head to our instructor's cars - Crown Victorias with the motors ripped out and turbo-charged Cobra motors stuck in instead, with Police Integration systems for that added 'oomph' (they looked like taxis until you turned them on, at which point they looked like taxis and sounded like jet engines) - and head out to the torque circles. Interesting thing, torque circles: you follow the line of a circle with the wheel of the car cocked out to a certain angle at a low speed, say 10 miles per hour, and you don't have to change the angle of the wheel. The instructor then has you step on the gas, and at 40, you're then following the outer line of a larger circle painted around the first one...still without changing the angle of the wheel. It sounds so simple - physics, and nothing more than that - but few people on the road think of things in terms of weight transfer within their vehicle from front to back or one side to the other, and that's all that driving is. It was an excellent introduction into thinking differently about cars, and set the tone of the entire experience - we'll tell you what we're going to do and why, then we'll show you, and then we're going to make you do it on your own.
Once that was finished, we went immediately into accident avoidance training in our own vehicles along with the rest of the class - of course they're not going to turn us loose on a track until we know just what the vehicles are capable of in an emergency situation, and until we know what the proper way of getting out of certain situations is. The deal is this: we're supposed to head down a long and narrow lane on the pad (re: a large, empty area of asphalt with lines painted on it used in various exercises, but nothing to hit in the event you lose control of your car) at a pre-determined speed, marked at certain points with cones. The lane empties out into three lanes, and at the end of the three lanes are three makeshift stoplights with a red and green light each. An instructor has control of the lights off to one side beneath a little roofed area, and he flicks two of them red and leaves one green. You've got to steer your car into the right lane, on the premise that the two red lanes are suddenly occupied with something unyielding (say, by a semi truck). You then turn the car around, drive back to the end of the line of students, and wait for another go. Sounds easy, sure, and it is, when the speed is 35 miles per hour, which is what they start you out on. By the time you hit fifty, however, and realize that you have about 20 feet to turn your 3,400 pound accelerating Mustang GT at a sharp angle into another lane, though, you're concentrating on doing what they've taught you to do: let up on the gas, squeeze the brake gently to put weight to the front, then ease off of the brake as you turn and squeeze into the gas again.
When all of us had completed that particular trial without error, we were feeling pretty confident. Of course, if it were only going to be that difficult and no harder, we wouldn't have been there. Various braking and turning exercises followed, many of them having to do with teaching us about ABS braking systems and how to utilize them properly ("ABS does NOT allow you to stop more quickly," the instructors must've said a thousand times. "A car with ABS brakes stops LESS quickly than a car without them, and instead of calling them Anti-lock Braking Systems, here, we use a differen't meaning for ABS: Ability to Brake and Steer.") When we'd finished this, we switched off with the group in the skid cars, and this was probably the most interesting part of the first day.
Skid cars, for those of you who aren't familiar with them, are basically vehicles with angled runners attached to their undercarriages in the front and rear, in front of the front wheels and behind the rear wheels. The runners come up to about the middle of the car's side panels, where they angle outward and come down in small wheels to the pavement, looking a bit like this: .^------^.
The wheels are connected to hydraulic systems within the legs of the runners, and at the behest of the instructor seated in the passenger seat, the runners lift the front or the rear end of the car while you're busy driving around a handling oval on the pad in order to induce a skid of the desired kind and magnitude - front wheels for an understeer simulation, rear for an oversteer. You're only going about 25 miles per hour, but the skids are pretty vicious looking in any event - enough to whip the car around a 540 degrees, if you're not careful. In these, we learned what it feels like to take a full skid in a vehicle, as well as how to successfully come out of either skid. Oversteer, in case you're curious, is the more difficult of the two to overcome, and the most dramatic in appearance.
The second day, we arrived bright and early and met up with our instructor from the previous day (three of us to our instructor, which is a great way to learn, and you remain with your instructor for the full course) - Craig Meintzer, a driver of no small skill and a great sense of humor. After a brief amount of time spent in the classroom learning about properly judging the apexes of corners (you'd think this would be easy, but a lot of times the apex is nowhere near where it would be in terms of geography, and the fastest line through a corner, I hate to inform everyone, is NOT the shortest one when you're talking about driving), and some time learning the proper steps involved in a heel-toe downshift, we were sent out to the pad. We must've practiced heel-toe downshift for at least half an hour, about six of us running loops in two lanes where the steps of the downshift in approaching the end of the lane were indicated by the placement of cones...one step per cone. Later, we spent time on the handling oval, trying to hit the apexes, which had also been thoughtfully marked out for us with cones - something we thought would be particularly easy right up until we saw someone from the other class spin out and smack into one of the plastic barriers on the side.
After lunch, we came back to find the pad drastically altered from what we expected it to be: there was what appeared to be a sea of cones littered across the asphalt, detailing a pathway we couldn't quite see from the classrooms inside. In that class, we talked about what we'd done earlier in the day, and then discussed the afternoon's events: timed autocross and a jaunt out onto the full-scale racing oval that connects to the larger track.
The autocross was, by far, my favorite event of the day, however. It involved moving as quickly as possible through said sea of cones while hitting the apexes of the corners as accurately as can be managed without knocking over any cones, for which the instructors would add a penalty second to your overall time. The first day, I didn't do too terribly well, though I managed to hit a very decent 1:01 - a minute and a second. The instructors told us that they've seen a few - three, four, or five - students in their time at the school achieve a time of 59 seconds. Later that day, we all went out to the handling oval, and one of the older gentleman Craig, my instructor, was teaching, ended up spinning out and landing in a gravel pit...oops.
The third day was by far the best. Cameron and I were the only two taking the three day course instead of the two day course, and so we ended up being the only people on the pad or the track at any given time...how cool is that.
First things first: we spend the early part of the day driving the autocross again. Cameron and I go at it tooth and nail, trying to best one another's times, and he manages to stay ahead of me for a considerable length of time by a margin of two tenths of a second...until I pull 1:00:01 - a hundredth of a second away from making myself the fifth or sixth Bondurant racing school student ever to hit a time of 59 seconds on the course. (Craig later tells us that one of the instructors, a former world champion, managed a time of 56 seconds - dizamn). Cameron comes in behind me at 1:00:26 - not much, when you're talking in terms of seconds, but miles when you're talking in terms of crossing the finish line. What can I say; I rule.
Later in the day, we donned full racing suits, balaclavas, and helmets (can you say 'hot'), and after a tour around the track in Craig's car, we strapped into our own cars (I was rather fond of mine by the time I left) and hit the pavement. Cameron ended up high centering his car, which...for those of you who don't know...means that he ended up grounding the undercarriage, like a beached whale of some kind, atop a ridge of gravel and dirt, with the front left wheel and the rear right wheel completely off of the ground.

(Uh, I wrote this a while ago, and now that I'm moved into my dorm at college, I'm not really enthusiastic about finishing it. Besides, I don't know anybody who'll actually read through that whole post, so I highly doubt anybody's going to be missing anything. Info on college later.)
:: m 2:33 PM [+] ::
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Not to bore those with whom I've already spoken, but:

GODAMN!

Bondurant racing school is the -shit-. I just spent seven and a half hours strapped via a four point harness to an insanely souped up 400 horsepower Mustang, whipping around cones and practicing skids and jumping on the breaks and laying on the throttle, and I cannot tell you how close to heaven this puts me. The fact that I've just gotten back from being taken out record shopping by two fairly good looking individuals to finish of my day means that this is about as close as I think I can get on this earth, at least in public, and I cannot complain.

However, I'm also completely wiped, and I'm heading to bed. I just thought I would share my utter elation with the few people who actually take the time to read this damn thing.

peezout
:: m 8:41 PM [+] ::
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ADDENDUM: Alright, so. He was doing well right up until the last entry, at least in terms of appeasing my volatile female nature with something topically sensitive and flattering.

They always second guess themselves, don't they?

(The new format is rather snazzy, though, I must say. Now all you need are better archives, T.)

Anyway, today I leave for racing school - the Bon Durant racing school in Phoenix, AZ. I'm going to bring my laptop, so hopefully I'll get to detail my no doubt fascinating adventures at high speed behind the wheel of a five-liter mustang that doesn't belong to me. Until then, adios, muchachos.
:: m 8:22 AM [+] ::
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I'm sure Tim's entry about his visit here is going to be more interesting than mine. To get to it, you can follow the Cruel Addiction/Babel Fish Production Facility link on the left hand side of my own blog. For my part, then, since it appears he's begun to write an interesting and more or less accurate account of his time here in Colorado, I'll just summarize, and say that I completely enjoyed myself. Granted, we didn't sleep much, and getting up was the last thing I wanted for pretty much the entireity of his visit, but I was pleasantly surprised by how laid back everything was, and by how things turned out (and by what a fantastic smile he has. Killer, I tell you).

Today, I wake up at 8:30 am (Hah! It's 6:00 now, I highly doubt that 'wake up' is going to be the proper phrase for what's going to happen in two and a half hours) to go snowboarding with BJ. Ironically, Tim wanted nothing more during his visit here than to see it actually snow, and right now we have about 5 or 6 inches of fresh snow on the ground, and it doesn't look like it'll be letting up anytime soon. Sorry, Tim - if only you'd stayed 3, 4 more days, you'd have seen it DUMP snow. Fortunately, that means that the mountain is going to be lovely, and well worth the pain of staying up this late for.

Anyway, I'm beat. Brain doesn't function..can't sleep...must ride...

-moi.
:: m 4:59 AM [+] ::
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Okay, so. I had nothing to worry about.

I picked Tim up at the airport right on time, and instantly it was like...yeah, okay. This is the person I've always known. I was a little nervous until after we ate, but once I had a little bit of food in me and we started talking, everything went so smoothly that I couldn't have asked for a better introduction. Last night, we went out and supported my friend Bailey at Liquid. I tried to warn him about the effect of the altitude (7000 ft. above sea level, and such), but he didn't really register it, I guess, because three rum and cokes later, he was like....whoooooooa. We spent the evening hanging out and dancing and avoiding local drama, then we came back to my pad and threw on the first episode of Oz, watched The Mothman Prophecies (kinda - we talked more than anything) and then watched Monsters, Inc., which he really enjoyed. After that, we headed to our rooms and passed out - all in all, a very chill evening.

Today, we slept until fairly late. He woke up 2 hours earlier than me and let me sleep despite the fact that I told him to wake me up, spent the time playing video games and listening to records downstairs. We headed out after a while to get food at City Market, met up with BJ, ate food, Tim went down to take a nap for an hour. We were late to Scoots...there was some minor drama because I didn't have the equipment there on time, so we headed out to the sushi place to support my friend Kevin who was spinning there. Had sushi - Tim had sushi for the first time ever and dug it (I was so proud!) - went back to Scoots, I threw on a break and hiphop set and got quite a few props. Now we're back at my pad, Pierre and he are playing DOA3, I'm writing this as quickly and succinctly as possible, and who knows what the evening'll bring...but in any event, I thought I'd just say that I think I've found a friend I want in my life for a long time, even if it's only through letters and phone calls. I'm so glad that he came, and that I had the balls to invite him.

This is a very content md signing off.
:: m 3:30 AM [+] ::
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